The dimensions were slipping against each other, causing tissue thin rifts where space would fold gently in and bend. Everything grew unstable and one could never be certain if one's environment would just suddenly up and change.

Pockets would form for extended periods of time and those caught within those walls would find themselves trapped; occasionally they would even find themselves changed. A bizarre merging of multiple versions, like viewing a drawing split into many parts and laid over top of one another in transparencies. Sometimes, these blips of reality were benign and barely noticeable. Others were horrifying, terrible mirrors of the life once had.

I found myself caught in a bad patch where an underground organization was working with some shadowy conspiracy to replicate the dead-eyed ones and overtake. Pod people without the pods. Some of those around me were unaffected, as I was. But not all of them. And it was difficult to tell one from another.

A group of us had holed up in an abandoned house. Its previous tenants seemed to have just gotten up and walked away, presumably in the panic which had ensued after the dimensional crease had occurred. I stood in the foyer and spoke through the hastily barricaded screen door to Neil Patrick Harris (was it actually supposed to be him? or just someone my sleeping brain parsed as just looking like him?) as he tried to convince me to open the door and let him in.

I wake up in graduated steps, eyes still sleep-burred and brain mossed over, fine and green. My dreams are normally difficult to shake aside after I've risen to the surface of conciousness. On a good day, it takes me at least twenty minutes to fully comprehend reality. On a bad day, it's a case of the bends.

This morning, I dreamt of you. You and I standing in a closet with the door shut, peering through the slats at an empty, darkened room. The hallway light threw strange shadow patterns across the carpet and you leaned to my ear to whisper someone else's words, twining your fingers companionably through mine.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.Thirty years now I have laboredTo dredge the silt from your throat.I am none the wiser.

You wrung the neck of a whiskey bottle before handing it over. The slow, secret burn down my throat is what eventually woke me up. I miss your face, my friend; our nights of wine and song are distant, growing colder by the hour.

I've been having funky-ass dreams for the past week; some have been just weird (and slightly on the heeee! side, like the one I had about Billy Corgan being obsessed with me) and others have been balls-to-the-wall nightmares.

Like last night.

I don't remember the specifics of it, but it involved Pyramid Head (see goofy icon) from Silent Hill fame.

...mother.

I'd hide under my bed, if I didn't think the fucker was under there waiting for me.

I stood under a streetlight, moths and other night-insects buzzing around the halogen glow, my hands clasped loosely in front of me.

Feeling something fluttering between my fingers, I raised my hands to my face and saw that I held a handful of tiny magpies. Their little black beaks poked out between my fingers here and there, and shiny black eyes peered up at me. I felt their collective heartbeats against the thin skin of my palms and the sleekness of their feathers.

"You know what you need to do, girl." Ghede's voice from behind me, just out of the circle of the streetlamp's thrown light. "You have to let them go. They have a job to do."

I threw my hands up in the air and spread them far apart. The little birds burst into the air in a shower of black and white. I watched them circle around my head, their bodies growing larger with each pass before they shot out into the darkness and out of my sight. My night vision has never been good and standing under a streetlight, attempting to see beyond was futile. Their calls and cries drifted back to me, however, and my spine gradually turned to steel under their song.

If anything ever happens to me, I need to know that you'll be able to handle everything. She said this to me, serious like she's never been with me. Most of our conversations even squeaking, chirping, and thousands of giggles. We've been likened to a flock of starlings descending in chaos, a pair of magpies set to steal, the golden apple thrown.

She rifled through a stack of papers on her desk, the words blurring together like dream-words so often do, until she came to what her search was for. A bright orange folder, full to bursting.

Orange? Couldn't you have picked a better colour? One that I'd enjoy looking at?

Quirking her mouth, she flapped her arms against her sides, a parody of my own actions when I have to stand in place when my entire body is jittering for movement. I started to laugh.

I stood in the doorway of his library and watched him pour over another dusty tome I'm not allowed to touch. Dim light fought to stream through the curtains, but was halted in its efforts and instead gathered in drips and drops at the edges of the heavy drapes.

"Poppet," he said without raising his head. "I would rather you not lurk around like some hungry ghost. You're free to enter here any time you should desire, you know this by now."

Quietly, I crept next to his chair and pretended to not attempt reading the book he had open in front of him. But, every time I peeped over his shoulder, the words ran together in a runny swirl of meaningless and my eyesight swam blearily. He closed the book, making his own effort to not notice me sneaking glances at the pages, and looked up at me steadily.

"You are a strong girl," he told me. "You know this, although you refuse to admit that to yourself for some unknowable reason. But, you're not strong enough to hold it all in."

He came to me, unbidden as always, in a dim library I have dreamt of before on several occasions. Sunlight bravely slanted through half closed draperies to drift in dusty puddles against the wooden floor. I am sitting at a long, low table with my head in my hands and propped over a book of saints. Its pages are full of bloody and colourful illustrations, my mind is full of incongruous questions. He leaned against the table, all graceful lines and sharp angles, with one leg propped elegantly against a chair. I peered up at him warily as he smiled down on my face.

"Poppet," he said. "You won't find the answers you're seeking in that dry, old tome." Leaning over, he tapped his two fingers against brittle paper pages, his index finger covering the impossibly serene face of St. Lucy. "You'll find them in here." His fingers rose to lightly brush the delicate skin of my forehead. "Work for it and they will come to you."

I scowled and pulled away from his touch. "Sir, it would be improper of me to begin spewing profanity at you in this place, though I feel an immense urge to. Therefore I will just say, quite plainly, that I have indeed been working for it and it eludes me still. Your insinuations of my famed laziness are annoying, at best."

He puffed a long breath of exasperation at me, the ever suffering teacher to the dunder headed pupil! He dropped his hand, which had remained in the air at my eyes' level, back to the book and began flipping back through the pages. The pages sang softly of his irritation.

Finally, he stopped their song and placed one finger directly under the entry he was looking for. "There," he said. "That is what you wish to know, though it pains me immeasurably that one of my ti fey could be so very thick-headed at times." He moved his hand from the book and slid it into an inner pocket of his suit, removing a folded over length of dark linen and laid it over the open pages.

I unrolled it to find finely made instruments, glinting sharply in the failing light. "The enterotome," he whispered. "The scissored hemostat. A long handled scalpel. All of these things and more can be found in her sword." He reached across the table to where a copy of Gray's Anatomy sat, long ago cast aside by some other furrow browed and frowning occupant of the library. Sliding it next to the displayed tools, he said "This book can be found in her bible." He stood from the his place at the table and walked behind me. Silence filled the room for such a length of time, that I imagined him gone. Then his voice swam against my ear, a smooth shadow. "And the calla may be found in her cloverleaf. Oh, my poor girl. I know you have been having a rough time of it, but your brain needs to wake itself again."

A small touch to my flaming cheek and he was gone again, as quietly as he had come.

I closed my eyes and impatiently shoved aside florid embarrassment, opening them again when I was sufficiently calm enough to read what he had so graciously pointed out. I scanned it once quickly, then again at a more leisurely pace. And a large grin began to spread across my face.

Some questions had indeed been answered and clarity was now shed on so many other notions that had once been previously and painfully obscured.

It was twilight and I was lying in the grass. My special spot by the river. The surface of the water was utterly still in this moment, reflecting the darkened sky's face back at it like a true and perfect mirror.

"No, poppet." The Unnamed One said and laid his hand against the top of my head. "Tell me what it is you enjoy about this place."

I closed my eyes and spoke. When I opened them again, he was sitting quietly. Then he smiled.

My dreams are so vivid, so enveloping, that I frequently wake up and believe them to be real for many moments after my eyes have opened. It's a disconcerting feeling, to suddenly have reality unfold and dissipate in the space of ten seconds.

I have dreamed of the past and woken with tears on my face. I have dreamed of things to come and believed them to be nonsensical images, until they came to pass (remind me to tell you of the time I was in high school and I dreamed of two boys in the honours English class, which I was not in, playing tennis at dusk in the parking lot of a large hotel). I've dreamt of people that I've known, never to be seen again. And of people I've yet to meet. For years, I dreamt of the same person continually. Never actually knowing them in the waking world. Then one day, I met them. And my world was forever changed.

I dream constantly of the lwa. Sometimes the dreams are meaningful and they leave me with knowledge that I desperately need or comfort for me to cling to in my darkest days. And sometimes the dreams are scattered and careless, with no real definition that I can accurately pinpoint.

Houses figure predominantly in my dreams. I frequently find myself in a large and rambling house, seemingly never-ending. There are rooms that I find myself drawn to, yet am terrified to even place my fingers upon the door. Some rooms are inhabited by regular people and some have invisible things inside of them, that I know would sink their teeth into me if I ever gave them the opportunity. There are places behind the walls of these houses that I always find myself trapped in, sometimes there are doors I can't get through because they're too small.

Some protagonists in my dreams aren't even really me, though it feels like such since it's coming from my eyes, my voice, my blood and my skull. I dream of these others' lives, their hearts. Some are broken things, while others are so full of joy that I can barely shake off their skins when I leave my bed.

Many of my dreams have formed the structure of feverishly written stories that so occupy my every waking thought that it is difficult to pull myself away for even a moment's respite. Some dreams won't leave me alone until I write them down.

The sun is going down in swathes of orange and purple, as I'm sitting on the brick wall surrounding the cemetary. I used to be afraid of this place, every time I walked past it a feeling of deep forboding would swirl in my heart and my steps would quicken.

Now however, it's become my place of quiet. Of calm assurance. It's strange how these things alter over the course of time, I think to myself as I light another cigarette and continue watching the sun sink slowly.

A movement off to the west catches my eye and I peer in that direction, but can't quite make anything out just yet. It looks like a man, but he's hunched over and walking in a stilted and staggering manner. It's no one that I've ever met before in this place, but after my encounter with the Nameless One I've learned to be a little more friendly to the people I may encounter in my travels.

As he comes closer, I see it is an elderly man with a crutch under one arm. At some length behind him, trots a small grey dog that seems more intent on ignoring the rest of the world then anything else. At least, I think it's a dog. Though in the failing light, it sometimes looks more like a large pewter furred rat.

The man moves abreast of me and I smile down at him from my perch on the wall. He squints up at me, for the setting sun is at my back and must be shining right into his eyes, and says, "You there, girl. You got any more of those cigarettes?"

Hopping down from the wall, so he doesn't have to crane his neck to speak with me, I dig in the pocket of my much loved and very tattered suit jacket for the rest of my cigarettes. Handing one to him, I realise who I'm speaking to and I grin broadly. "Ayibobo, Legba Ati-Bon! Did you like the statue I got for you?" I bow deeply to him, still grinning.

"Don't be a smart ass, girl. I'm here to tell you something. You got to pass it on to who it's for."

I hand one of the cigarettes out of the pack to him and he tucks it behind his ear. "What's the message, Papa?"

"You got a friend, girl? Got long legs and talks funny like that Brigette, him? You tell him, he wants to travel? Don't do it the week before or the week after his birthday." I open my mouth to begin asking him what he's talking about, but he holds up his hand to silence me. "No questions. I tell you. You tell him. We're square. And I'll forget that bit about the statue. I know your friend bought that for you and you gave it to me. You been hanging out with that Ghede too much, he starting to rub off on you. Careful wording in your promises and that. Get yourself into more trouble doing that."

I've got enough thought in my head to look suitably chagrined at my little charade being found out. I begin to apologise for it, but he stops me again. "No sorrys, girl. You just remember this one thing, eh?" A wide grin breaks through his beard. "You can't bullshit a bullshitter." He claps me on the shoulder, heartily amused at his own joke. Stumping away on his crutch, his laughter remains behind for quite some time.

It is night.And the sky stretches over my head like a great black canopy.The news has been full of reports of Mars, how it's looming in the sky like a tiny second moon. A crowd of people has gathered in the park down the winding road from my apartment. The geese and white ducks which normally inhabit this area are silent, gliding smoothly across the water with nary a ripple. They've probably been put off by the teeming human crowds invading their home.

A collective gasp rose suddenly, a gentle sighing that wound through the air. Everyone around me had their heads craned back on their necks, pointing up and marvelling at the sky.

I crushed my smoldering cigarette underfoot and peered with them.

It wasn't the red planet they were gawking at, it was the stars.Stars, falling down around us in droves. Like nothing else I'd ever seen before. I sat up for a meteor shower once, in a cold February night. The falls were sporadic and occasional, nothing like this.

Now, the sky was coming down around me. Swiftly.What would happen when all the stars were gone?My heart sunk low in my chest and an insidious fear swept through my skin.

NyQuil is the antichrist, I say. I've been taking it like a good girl for three days and all it does is make me have to pee, give me weird dreams, and dry my sinuses up to a painful level.

Weird dreams, you ask?Whoa yeah.

One of them this morning involved me tearing about my house, which is not really my house, because I was trying to find a tiny rectangular piece of paper that I had written Nick Cave's social security number on. errrrr. Yeah.

Let's all ignore the fact that not only do I not posses Nick Cave's social security number in real life, but also the fact that he does not /have/ a social security number as he's Australian. Do they have something of the same ilk?

Now I'm hitting Gooja to find out.

*after a moment*

It would seem that they do have a social security benefits thing. However, in my dream I had a picture in my head of my card, though that wasn't what I was looking for.

This is all nonsense. I think my fever is coming back. I also think that the aforementioned evil NyQuil is working its lunacy on me and causing me to talk even more shit then I already do.

Please to be excusing anything I do or say whilst under this nasty influence.

A city, early morning. In that sort of blue half light that slides across your skin like new cream. I'm not sure what city this is, it's more of a combination of them. New Orleans, Philadelphia, London. All the cities I have loved. All the cities I have lost. All the places which remind me of pain. This city is a palace, built of despair.

It is silent, but for the slow tap of my bootheels against the concrete. In my right hand is a large silver dollar coin, real silver and stolen from the pirate's booty found in my father's basement after my grandmother died. I flip it over my knuckles, something which I could never do in my waking world. My heart hurts and my head is slightly spinny.

"Girl," he says from behind me. I did not know he was there. "You in the wrong part of town."

I turn slowly and not even the sight of him can crack a smile. I am a porcelian doll. Featureless, smooth. Hard. "Baron." I say to him quietly. And that is all. My voice isn't there.

His dark brow wrinkles with worry and deep concern. "Ange, I know you maman is sick. I see her face, even though it be a bit hazy. I know you scared, I can smell it coming off from you in waves like the sea. But, you can't be walking in these places. They not healthy. They make /you/ sick, too."

I flicker my eyes to the side, a habit of discomfort. I frown and the coin rocks over my knuckles again and again. He doesn't say anything now, merely watching me stand in my skin. I drop my coin holding hand and the silver dollar spins from my skin to bounce off the sidewalk with an audible clink.

He catches it on the rebound, then wraps his arms around my shoulders. "Cry, girl." He whispers and the solemn note in his voice, an inflection I'm not used to hearing from him, upsets me even more then I already was. "You go and cry."

I am at work, feeling stupendously and amazingly like ASS. My fever comes and goes, I've had to pull all my hair up (and it is quite a lot) because it was driving me crazy every time I got hit with the feverishness. Top all of this off with the regular collateral girl is out sick today, so the rest of us have to do her job. Something which I hate doing, especially as no one does MY job for ME when I'm out sick.

hmph.

I check and re-checked the television listings for tonight and tomorrow. Stellastarr* will be on the show that also has Shannen Doherty as a guest (eep). So, that looks to be tomorrow. Thursday night/ Friday morning at 1:35 am.

Yes, I doubt myself at every turn. Which is why I checked the listing.

I couldn't sleep for shit last night. Tossing and turning and sticking my head under the pillow. This is two nights in a row now. And I'm definitely feeling it, at the moment. My head feels like it's the size of a chinese grapefruit. And in case you've never seen one before, those motherfuckers are BIGGER then my own head.

Weird dreams. Uneasy dreams.

Carrie and her brother were in one of them, walking with me through some nasty warehouse place, looking for a friend of theirs who we never found.Another dream found by down by the ocean in Fraserburgh, alone and in the middle of the night, watching something rise out of the water. Something that made me want to run.Yet another dream had Baron Samedi sliding an arm around my shoulder and turning me away from something he didn't want me to see.And still another was of me giving my mother's eulogy. That's the one that left me the most scared. Especially since I saw a cardinal this morning.

I don't like omens. Not one bit.And this had better just be dreamwalking and birdwatching.

I'm sitting on the green, green banks of the Mississippi river again, with one foot dangling languid in the water. It's been weeks since the strange one last spoke to me. And it's been forever since I walked the uneven, jagged tooth rows of the graveyard. Is something wrong with me?

I fret and worry and twist bits of my hair around my fingers until it arcs angrily away from my ears. Overhead, the blue and brilliant sky is painful to look at. Slitting my eyes against the heat hazy glare, I lean back. Wriggling myself comfortable into the niche I dug by hand a few months back.

This is my spot, my warming rock, my incubator. Here is where I can pluck fruit from my brain and examine it for imperfections. All around me, the world twitches and rages and seethes. But this is my calm.

I bring that calm into my lungs, breath by simple breath. Exhale stillness.

Around one wrist, a slender and smooth body circles against my skin. I can feel his tongue, a minute flickering, tasting the air. Tasting my mood. He slides against the bones of my hand, a long sinuous slide of scale to flesh. I raise my snake bound arm to my face and open one eye, peer my storm blue into his stone black.

Smiling, I allow him to brush his questing head against the lines of my jaw in a tiny exploration. Then as suddenly as he showed himself, his slithers back down my arm to the ground and disappears into a patch of scrub grass.

"Oh, my dove." A voice says behind me. "You seem to be making friends at every turn."

"I gave him space on my altar," I reply tartly. "I'd do the same for you, if you'd only tell me your name." I lean back on my palms to look at him, upside down. Today he's wearing a wide brimmed hat, a preacher man's hat, and it blocks his eyes from my sight.

The warm waters of the Mississippi lap like chocolate brown velvet at my bare feet. Sun on my skin, I've lifted my face to the sun with closed eyes and smiling mouth. It's been so long since I sat in Louisana. So long since I've felt this much at home.

I'm drowsing gently (how odd, to sleep in a dream), lulled to a peaceful serenity by the sounds of the seagulls crying to Heaven overhead and the quiet thumming of paddleboats in the distance.

A shadow falls across me, a sudden and slight chill taking away the epicurean cat-in-the-sun feeling I had been luxuriating in. I open my eyes, slowly and unwillingly, to see who the intruder is.

A tall man, a thin man. His face in deep shadow, with the fiery sun behind him. Long hair tied with a black ribbon, curling down his back like a shocking river of milk infused coffee.

His suit, though threadbare, seemed finely made and of an era that I have no personal knowledge of. Some time long in the past, but it tickled my brain and I was reminded of something that I couldn't quite remember.

He stood there, staring at me with no challenge. Just waiting for me to speak? Then it hit me, what I was reminded of. I began to close my eyes again, wanting to drift back into the warmth of my riverside nap."You look like an antique mortician. You're a tin type. Now leave my dreams alone and let me enjoy this."

The laughter that spiraled from his throat covered me in smoky sugar sweetness like caramel. "Oh, poppet. If you only knew." A soft Irish brouge? A Scottish burr? I couldn't decipher the homeland that birthed an accent like he had.

He crouched down close in front of me, all knees and angles. My eyes immediately sprang back open and I inched back surreptitiously. Even in dreams, I don't care to have my personal space invaded. Especially if they're a stranger.

This close to me, the sun didn't work quite so hard to hide his face in backlit shadows. Sharp angles, just like the rest of him. Sharp and pretty. Fine edged enough to cut oneself if they were to fling themselves against him.

A pretty stranger in a dream? I don't trust such things. And beauty doesn't do much to sway me to begin with. Not with the sights I've seen and the pain I've lived through that were caused by a beautiful face.

"Who are you?" I asked.

He smiled then. "You don't know me. Not yet, at any doing. However, I have the aquaintance of one of your patrons. Distant relatives, if you will. Her husband and I are in the same profession."

"And what do you want with me? I've enough patrons already, thank you."

He laughed again, reaching out to chuck me under my chin. I pulled away and glared at him. This man was making me feel like a child and that never went over well with my temperment.

He stood just then, probably sensing somehow that my temper was flaring. "It just may behoove you to learn that any patron is a good patron. You could have one or one thousand. They hold your heart, they watch your back. They lead you home when your light's gone out."

I felt small, chastened with his words. My arrogance can get the best of me at the very worst of times. He rose over me, an amused smile twisting its course across his face. Rising, rising, now blotting out the sun, now blotting out the sky. The world disappeared and my mind swam dizzly through a chilled depth I'd never felt in my entire life.

Cold and still, an icy blanket to wrap around my form. This was the silence of the deepest parts of the ocean, where the blind idiot fish are gods. This was the hush of six feet of earth over your head. This was the quiet gloom of a grey mausoleum.

"Have no worries or fears, my dove. You've not angered me." His voice throbbed through my veins. He was everywhere around me and I couldn't shut him out. "In fact, you've done quite the opposite."

More laughter, amused and low. Nothing malevolent, but I couldn't handle this continual overtaking of my senses. Or rather, the deadening of them.

"We'll see each other soon. My promise."

He was suddenly gone and I was alone. The sun, back in the sky. The waters of the river now thrashing angrily against the pebble dotted bank. I stretched my arms and legs, flexing the life back into my fingers.

I was in a mental hospital. Lying on the narrow bed in my room, there's a window directly in my line of sight. And a small television to my right, on a mahogany table. (you can ask them for movies, I remember. They had any movie you could possible think of, but at the moment my mind wiped clean of any and all movie titles that I might want to watch.) Everything around me is the muted colour of twilight, blues and greys and soft tones of dim white.

Calm, so calm. I have the blankets pulled up around me and my stuffed Cheshire cat curled into the crook of my arm. Looking out the window, it's snowing. And I'm just lying there watching the snow drift silently. It builds up on the tree branches poking around the window frame and I smile lazily, reminded of sugar.

I had rather unsettling dreams this morning. Strange and uneasy. I dreamt I saw six buildings in London go down. Just...fall to the ground. Collapsing. Rubble and dust everywhere. But, it was completely silent.

I'm sure it's a throwback to the images of the World Trade Centers going down that I've seen on television and in magazines. But, it still shook me. London for me is what NYC is to Carrie. It's the city of my heart. I don't think I'll ever set eyes on it again, not in realtime at any rate. But, it still exists in my dreams. And I can still step foot in it in those.

And to see it wounded like that, to be given such an enormous scar...Well, it's more than a little bit shaking.